I had once read or heard or been told how soldiers who wanted to join the SAS were ordered to run a long distance with a heavy pack on their back. They ran and ran, and at last they arrived at the end, near to collapsing. And then they were ordered to turn round and run the distance back again. You think you can't bear any more, but you can.
There is always more in you than you think. Hidden depths. That's what I told myself. For what was my breaking point?
I was woken by slaps on my face. I didn't want to wake. What was the point? What was there to wake for? Just curl up and sleep. More slaps. Hood pulled up, the gag pulled out of my mouth.
"You awake?"
"Yes. Stop."
"I've got food. Open your mouth."
"What food?"
"What the fuck does that matter?"
"Drink first. Mouth dry."
There was muttering in the dark. Steps going away and down. That was good. A tiny victory. A minuscule bit of control. Steps came back up. The straw in my mouth. I was desperately thirsty but I also needed to rinse away the lint and fluff of the awful old rag I'd been choking on for so long.
"Open your mouth."
A metal spoon was pushed into my mouth with something soft on it. Suddenly the idea of eating something I couldn't see, pushed into my mouth by this man who was going to kill me, was so disgusting that I imagined chewing on raw human flesh. I started to retch and spit. More swearing.
"Fucking eat or I'll cut the water off for a day."
A day. That was good. He wasn't planning to kill me today.
"Wait," I said, and took several deep breaths. "All right."
The spoon scraped in a bowl. I felt it in my mouth. I licked the food and swallowed it. It was something porridgy, but blander and smoother and slightly sweet. It tasted like one of those powdery bland mushes for babies. Or it might have been one of those concoctions that is given to convalescents, the sort you buy in a chemist's. I thought of gibbering glassy-eyed people sitting in hospital beds being spoon-fed by bored nurses. I swallowed and more food was pushed into my mouth. Four spoonfuls altogether. I wasn't being fattened, just kept alive. When I was finished I sucked more water through a straw.
"Pudding?" I said.
"No."
I had an idea. An important idea.
"When did we meet?"
"What do you mean?"
"Since I woke up here, I've had the most terrible headache. Was it you? Did you hit me?"
"What are you on about? Are you fucking me around? Don't you fuck me around. I could do anything to you."
"I'm not. I don't mean anything like that. The last thing I remember .. . I'm not even sure. It's all so blurred. I can remember being at work, I can remember .. ." I was going to say 'my boyfriend' but I thought that making him jealous, if that's what it would do, might not be a good idea. "I remember my flat. Doing something in my flat. I woke up here and I've no idea how I got here or how we met. I wanted you to tell me."
There was a long pause. I almost wondered if he had gone but then there was a whinnying sound, which I realized with a shock was a wheezing laugh.
"What?" I said. "What did I say? What?"
Keep talking. Maintain communication. I was thinking all the time. Thinking, thinking. Thinking to stay alive, and thinking to stop feeling, because I knew dimly that if I allowed myself to feel I would be throwing myself off a cliff into darkness.
"I've got you," he said.
"Got me?"
"You're wearing a hood. You're not seeing my face. You're being clever. If you can make me think you never saw me, then maybe I'll let you go." Another wheezing laugh. "You think about that, do you, while you're lying there? Do you think about going back to the world?"
I felt a lurch of misery that almost made me howl. But it also made me think. So we did meet. He didn't just grab me from behind in a dark alley and hit me over the head. Do I know this man? If I saw him, would I know his face? If he spoke naturally, would I recognize his voice?
"If you don't believe me, then it doesn't matter if you tell me again, does it?"
The rag was jammed into my mouth. I was lifted down and led over to the bucket. Carried back. Dumped on the ledge. No wire. I took that to mean that he wasn't going out of the building. I felt his breath close on my face, that smell.
"You're lying in here trying to work things out. I like that. You're thinking that if you can make me believe that you can't identify me, I'll play with you for a while, then I'll let you go. You don't understand. You don't see the point. But I like it." I listened to his scraping whisper, trying to recall if the voice was in any way familiar. "They're different. Like Kelly, for example. Take Kelly." He rolled the name round in his mouth as if it was a piece of toffee. "She just cried and fucking cried all the time. Wasn't a bloody plan. Just crying. It was a bloody relief just to shut her up."
Don't cry, Abbie. Don't get on his nerves. Don't bore him.
The thought came to me out of the darkness. He's been keeping me alive. I didn't mean that he hadn't killed me. I had been in this room now for two or three or four days. You can live for weeks without food but how long can a human being survive without water? If I had just been locked in this room, unattended, I would be dead or dying by now. The water I'd gulped down had been his water. The food in my gut was his food. I was like an animal on his farm. I was his. I knew nothing about him. Outside this room, out in the world, this man was probably stupid, ugly, repulsive, a failure.
He might be too shy to talk to women, work mates might bully him. He could be the silent, weird one in the corner.
But here I was his. He was my lover and my father and my God. If he wanted to come in and quietly strangle me, he could. I had to devote every single waking second to thinking of ways to deal with him. To make him love me, or like me, or be scared of me. If he wanted to break down a woman before killing her, then I had to remain strong. If he hated women for their hostility, then I had to reassure him. If he tortured women who rejected him, then I had to ... what? Accept him? Which was the right choice? I didn't know.
Always and above all I had to stop myself believing that it probably didn't matter what I did.
I didn't count the time without the wire. It didn't seem to matter. But after a time he came back in. I felt his presence. A hand on my shoulder made me start. Was he checking I was still alive?
Two choices. I could escape in my mind. The yellow butterfly. Cool water. Water to drink, water to plunge into. I tried to re-create my world in my head. The flat. I walked through the rooms, looked at pictures on the wall, touched the carpet, named the objects on shelves. I walked around my parents' house. There were odd blanks. My father's garden shed, the drawers in Terry's desk. But still. So much in my head. So many things. In there and out there. But sometimes as I was wandering through these imaginary rooms, the floor would disappear from beneath my feet and I would fall. These mind games might be keeping me sane but I mustn't just keep sane. I must also keep alive. I must make plans. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to hurt, gouge, mash him. All I needed was an opportunity but I couldn't see any possibility of an opportunity.
I tried to imagine that he hadn't really killed anybody. He might be lying to scare me. I couldn't make myself believe it. He wasn't just making an obscene phone call. I was here, in this room. He didn't need to make up stories. I knew nothing about this man but I knew he had done this before. He had practised. He was in control.
The odds against me were bad. They were as bad as they could be. So any plan I could come up with didn't have to have a particularly good chance of success. But I couldn't think of any plan at all that had any chance of success. My only plan was to stretch it out as long as I could. But I didn't even know if I was stretching it out. I had a horrible feeling another horrible feeling, all my feelings were horrible that this was all on his timetable. All talk, all my feeble plans and strategies, was just noise in his ear like a mosquito buzzing around his head. When he was ready, he would slap it.